I tried all of the standard sensors and I wanted more. If temperature and humidity is not the enough the AirGradient One will give you more data about your air than you ever need. This is how to use this sensor local first with full Home Assistant integration. Installation & Read more
I have run the awesome MagicMirror² software on a Pi Zero W in the past. While this works ok the small Pi is not powerful enough for more complex widgets. Here is how the Pi 4 compares and how I set it up to run my magic mirror. Setting up Read more
If you want to display a huge number, lets say 6 digits or more, showing the full number does not look very good and takes too much space. Here is a quick tip on how to show these bigger numbers in a more concise format. Single stat panel with a Read more
Prometheus works great for collecting server stats on a Raspberry Pi but was missing some information on a Raspberry Pi in docker stats and the cadvisor used more CPU than the containers it was monitoring. Here is how fixed those issues. Cleaning up & fixing the downloaded dashboards When I Read more
To analyze errors or just to watch what is happening: your smart home gets so much better with some proper monitoring. Prometheus + Grafana is one of THE solutions for monitoring pretty much anything. Getting it to run on a Raspberry Pi does not need much time but still can Read more
I love my Grafana dashboard to see everything important in my smart home on glance. Using rows and the modern time series panel makes it even better. Let me show you how I updated my dashboard. Grafana dashboards Grafana is this awesome open tool to create dashboards. I have set Read more
InfluxDB (1.8) is a great database but it logs every web access as an error by default. This creates a lot of error entries in a log aggregation tool like Loki. There is a simple fix though. Loki & log aggregation Loki is a great tool to aggregate logs from Read more
The Grafana Loki logging aggregator is a great tool to collect logs from lots of places (Docker containers) in one place. Loki log size can unfortunately grow quite big though with the default settings. When my Raspberry Pis SD card was nearly full I looked for some ways to combat Read more
Building a DIY smart home needs a good set of software tools to write code, monitor your devices and update data. Here are my favorite smart home tools. Over the years I have used quite a lot and those turned out to be the best for the job so far. Read more
A smart home server is the heart of your setup. It needs to be running well to power everything else. Monitoring Raspberry Pis, my favorite low power server, is easy to set up and helps you to detect errors early on. This is how you can easily set up monitoring Read more